Twain breaks out of his wise-cracking character in Palestine one time before his Tahoe reverie in the Galilee. “I looked upon the place where the true cross once stood, with a far more absorbing interest than I had ever felt in any thing earthly before,” he writes of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (432). Despite all of its “clap-trap side-shows,” the church “is still grand, reverend, venerable—for a god died there.” Centuries of pilgrims wet its shrines with tears and gallant soldiers “wasted their lives away in a struggle to seize it and hold it sacred from infidel pollution.” In his own day, he notes, two rival nations expended “millions in treasure and rivers of blood” in a war over which nation would build its new, golden dome. “History is full of this old Church of the Holy Sepulchre,” he concludes, “full of blood that was shed because of the respect and the veneration in which men held the last resting-place of the meek and lowly, the mild and gentle, Prince of Peace!”
Two nations expended millions of treasure and rivers of blood in another war of his time and far closer to home, but nowhere in Innocents does Twain recall it, at least not directly.
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In A Place Among the Nations Netanyahu offers a digest of observations by nineteenth-century travelers on Palestine, and then hones in on Innocents with a full two-page set of pastiches (39), some of them identical to those found in Peters. One pastiche reads:
These unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounts of barrenness, that never, never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines . . . ; the melancholy ruin of Capernaum: this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under its six funeral [sic] palms. . . . A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and actions. . . . We reached Tabor safely. . . . We never saw a human being on the whole route.
The lines excerpted are intensely poetic. Note the iambic, for example, in “that néver, néver, néver / do sháke the glare,” and the alliterative beat in “slumbering under its six funereal [plumes of] palms.” Or take this pastiche found in Netanyahu (Twain 462 Netanyahu 40), which is itself a slightly condensed version of a pastiche in Peters: “Jericho the accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua’s miracle left it more than three thousand years ago . . . [Bethlehem,] the hallowed spot where the angels sang, ‘Peace on earth, good will to men,’ is untenanted by any living creatures.” The first sentence carries a haunting echo:
Twain: “Jé-ri-cho / the ac-cúrsed / lies a móld / (e)ring rú(i)n / todáy.”
Echo: “ John Brown’s/ bódy / lies a-móld / (er)ing in / the gráve.”
In evoking the rhythm and vocabulary of the famous marching song “John Brown’s Body” that inspired the Civil War anthem, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, what is Twain mourning?
Or take the Netanyahu pastiche that begins (40, Twain 462): “Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energy. . . . Palestine is desolate and unlovely. . . It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land.” The phrase “sackcloth and ashes,” from the King James Bible, is embedded within a strong, almost singsong rhythm, which is then extended out in the second sentence in a metrical chant.
Pá-le-stine / Síts in / Sáck cloth and / Ásh-es
over it Broóds the Spéll / of a Cúrse / that has Wíth / ered its Fíelds / and Fét tered its / Énergy.
The melancholy is both poetic and theological. In place of the creative spirit that brooded over the deep is the spell of a curse that broods over the land. “A hope / less, dréa / ry, / héart bró / ken lánd”: Twain’s incantation calls into being the reality it would describe. As Twain remarks near the end of his Palestine reminiscence (462), “Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise? Can the curse of the deity beautify the land?” [Emphasis Twain’s].
Twain mourns the loss of the pre-lapsarian noble sea in California. He mourns the death of a god, Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace. He mourns a land that, by theological necessity, he knows must be wasted. And he pines as well for certain “stirring scenes.”
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